 Eclectic Activists, Sex Worker Advocates
and
Journalists Attend Grassroots Media Conference
By Robert Waddell, June 1, 2009
On Saturday May 30th, the sixth annual Grassroots Media Conference brought together a diverse and wide-ranging collection of independent media from all over New York City at CUNY’s Hunter College. The conference served to “build bridges of social change…within the grassroots media,” said co-organizer Malaika in her opening remarks.
The day was split into four workshop sessions with various titles ranging in expertise and scope like “Digital Storytelling,” “The Obama Phenomenon,” “Holding Media and Non-profits Accountable to their workers and communities,” and “Immigrant Communities Using Grassroots Media for Movement Building.”
In one of the morning sessions, “Sex Workers, Resistance, and the Media,” current and former sex workers discussed how sex workers were laborers interested in work place safety, health insurance and a more realistic portrayal of their profession in the media.
 Audacia Ray of “Sex Work Awareness” showed a PSA humanizing the industry and told of a little known legislation that would make carrying condoms illegal in New York State. Megan Andelloux of Sexual Resource Center said that the Craig’s List killer was really about a man who terrorized and murdered a woman and should not have been the condemnation of sex workers.
In another workshop, “art of love and struggle: hip hop is our life hip hop is resistance,” Spirtichild of Movement in Motion Artist and Activist Collective, discussed the role of arts in today’s struggle for peace and justice.
“We talked about political rap and making a difference to just break through the mainstream with music that has a higher meaning,” said Jesus De la Cruz, a film major at Hunter College.
The conference on the whole was a configuration and a cry from the left independent media scrambling for recognition and the current high shift from paper media to online sources. These grassroots media grappled in many ways with their own significance outside the mainstream media.
“Does this print product need to exist?,” asked Christy Thornton of the North American Congress on Latin America at the workshop titled “Life After the Death of Left Print Journalism?”
 Arun Gupta, editor of the Indypendent newspaper, romanticized the need for paper media and publishing.
“All print media is in crisis…the audience hasn’t fallen but migrated to the web. There’s been an explosion of content on the web…” but presentation in print is significantly different from information on the internet.
Thornton discussed a phenomenon called ‘mission drift’ where many activists find themselves working to raising money but not doing their activist political work. And as they burnout from work, these activists also burnout from the causes they believe in, which has led to many of these institutions and grassroots media outlets to question their reason for being in existence.
Discussions included the digital divide and how many poor communities and communities made up primarily of people of color have little access to mainstream media as well as the internet to freely get their hands on journalism and information.
The day long conference was held in the North Building at Hunter College. There were socialists, online librarians, editors, reporters, web masters, video streamers, high school and college students in attendance with a score of film makers. The independent press consists of dedicated journalists and activists who wear their activism and politics on their sleeves. Most often they work outside of mainstream media with little to no funding and lots of volunteers. However, the independent press does what mainstream media does not do, which is keep a watchful and professional eye on what is happening in people’s struggles locally, nationally and world wide. Grassroots media include media groups as diverse at NPR, The Indypendent, PR Sun.com, The Independent Press Association, many immigrant presses and VirtualBoricua.org.
“This was really cool,” Renata Thakurdyal, Hunter College freshman, said, “There’s so much to learn when it comes to social justice causes.”
This story was developed through the Education Beat Writing Fellowship at the New York Community Alliance. |
